On His Trapeze

by

Michael Wood

On​ 2 December 1978 Roland Barthes reported to an audience at the Collège de France on his desire to change as a writer, and told them about a specific moment when the thought of a ‘conversion’ hit him: 15 April that year.

Casablanca. The sluggishness of the afternoon. The sky clouds over, a slight chill in the air ... a kind of listlessness ... bears upon everything I do ... The beginnings of an idea ... to enter into literature, into writing, to write, as if I had never written before: to do only that.

‘All the same’, he said a moment later, ‘I don’t want to make too much of that 15 April.’ Conversion was an idea, a dream, and his new plan, the object of his new fidelity and excitement, was above all to do with wanting to write differently rather than a project for a specific act of writing. He had ‘heard it said’, he reported in his next lecture, that he was writing a novel, ‘which isn’t true; if it were I clearly wouldn’t be in a position to propose a lecture course on its preparation.’ And then: ‘But I’ve decided to push that fantasy as far as it will go, to the point where: either the desire will fade away or it will encounter the reality of writing and what gets written won’t be the Fantasised Novel.’

Barthes died just over a year later, in March 1980, so he didn’t get to push the fantasy for very long. Many of his readers have regretted the loss of what might have been easily recognisable as a novel, although the sentence I have just quoted seems to exclude its possibility. Other critics (and friends) like Antoine Compagnon have thought Barthes’s last book, Camera Lucida, was his novel; and still others see the notes for what Barthes called his Vita Nova as a conceptual framework for the novel we are all invited to write. It’s striking that in those notes Barthes includes the novel (along with the essay, the fragment, the diary) as illustrating only disappointment and impotence, so we should take seriously his idea of the new, of writing that is no longer what writing used to be. The work to come (if it came) wouldn’t look or feel like a novel even if it was one.

Other intriguing aspects of the notes are the repetition of the (after all significant) date of 15 April 1978, the recurrence of the idea of the mother as guide (Henriette Barthes died on 25 October 1977), the possibility of taking Tolstoy as one’s master instead of Proust, and the notion that the story of the conversion, the entry into writing, itself will provide the plot of the new work. I should add, though, that another note makes fun of just this idea: ‘All this would mean that one gives up the childishness of the Vita Nova Narrative: these attempts of the frog who wants to be as big as ...’

Barthes evokes Novalis, whom he quotes in his lectures: ‘The art of the novel excludes all continuity.’ He also alludes to a distinction Heidegger makes between an acceptance of ‘the assigned circle of the possible’ and the desire to leave this circle and enter the realm of ‘what is no longer the possible’. For Barthes writing represents the impossible and idleness (oisiveté) the possible: you can’t have one even if you try, and you can have the other without trying. We may speculate that what he wanted was not to achieve the impossible, and still less to arrive at some comfortable middle space of possibility, but to manage something like an occasional, dazzling infraction of the logic of opposites: to find in effort some of the virtues of pleasure.

This is just what he argues for in his last piece of writing, still in his typewriter at the time of the accident that brought him to his death. The title is a little misleading, but this move also helps us to understand the claims in play: ‘One always fails in speaking of what one loves.’ This is what we are tempted to assert, Barthes suggests, of Stendhal’s evocations of Italy in his journals, and by extension of almost anything that matters to us, once we try to put it into words. It is the phrase ‘we are entitled to repeat mournfully (or tragically)’. But now we’re showing off in our pessimism, too pleased to fail, and Barthes is moving on. There is another Stendhal, the one who wrote the opening pages of La Chartreuse de Parme, where his love of Italy comes fully alive, irradiates the prose, in Barthes’s image. Stendhal was writing there, Barthes says, as distinct from (presumably) merely writing down, or putting into writing, what was in the journals. This is the new practice that Barthes wanted to enter. He associated it with the novel, because he often found it in novels. But the novel here is only a name for the achievement of an effect: that of what Barthes calls ‘festivity’.

Two years after Barthes’s death, Chantal Thomas wrote very well of ‘the persistence of a theoretical desire progressively liberated from a concern with seriousness or consequence’. Does that sound frivolous? The concept of theoretical desire suggests a project that might be urgent, as well as fun. Barthes himself has a wonderful phrase about theory. ‘To some extent, theory is also a fiction’ – the context is a 1977 discussion of Sartre’s philosophical novels – ‘and it was always in this guise that it tempted me: theory is, as it were, the novel that people enjoyed writing over the last ten years.’ Theory was the novel Barthes enjoyed writing – many critics were busy thinking they were philosophers – and perhaps the only novel he needed to write.

Tiphaine Samoyault is a little uncertain about Barthes’s status, sure only about his fame and his deserving protracted attention. She says he is a ‘great thinker’ – well, actually that he is ‘like all great thinkers’ – but didn’t produce ‘any system, any “strong thought”’. She is not wrong, but the near contradiction leaves us up in the air. She departs from the largely chronological line of her story to devote whole chapters to Barthes’s relations with quite different figures (Gide, Sartre, Sollers, Foucault), and she has some extended lucid comments on the connections and disconnections between Barthes and Blanchot, Derrida and Lévi-Strauss. None of this quite situates him as anything other than some sort of French intellectual, and indeed it is hard to situate him more precisely. Samoyault’s idea of ‘a politically committed solitude’ doesn’t help much, but the project of seeking ‘to be of one’s time in spite of everything’ gets us somewhere, and some of her remarks about Barthes’s personality – ‘assertive and elusive’ and ‘distanced proximity’ – work quite well as propositions about his prose style.

It’s clear that – just to stick with the names Samoyault invokes – Gide, Sartre, Sollers and Blanchot are writers in a sense that Barthes is not, and that Sartre (again), Lévi-Strauss and Derrida are thinkers in a sense that he is not, if only because we don’t automatically regard critics as writers or thinkers. And then we feel the differences for more complicated reasons, ones that have to do with Barthes rather than his notional job.

Two thoughts that recur in appreciations of Barthes are useful: he is a teacher who doesn’t teach, a commentator who has nothing to say. When Compagnon looks for a formula he says Barthes was not a maître à penser – the French phrase for guru – ‘but something like the master of a workshop, a master worker, a master artisan’. Italo Calvino said Barthes’s field was the science of the single object, the art of generalising where only the particular was in play. This was ‘the great thing that he – I do not say taught us, because one can neither teach nor learn this – but showed us is possible’. Louis-Jean Calvet, Barthes’s first biographer, said in 1990 that the loss of his voice, the absence of a ‘word’ from him, produced a ‘silence that leaves us prey to mere noise’. And Foucault, cited by Samoyault, said Barthes was the person ‘who most helped us to shake up a certain form of academic knowledge that was non-knowledge’.

Perhaps these notions begin to add up. An artisan, the proponent of an impossible science, a man who had words for us (which is not the same thing as putting words in our mouth or telling us what to think), a man who claimed no perfect knowledge but could spot non-knowledge wherever it held sway, and especially where it was disguised as its opposite: this is someone, and it could hardly be anyone other than Barthes. Such a person would be ‘of his time’ even when he seemed to have opted out of it, as Barthes did at certain points. The time would just not be the same without him. Barthes cultivated a careful irony in relation to this idea. He said, for example, that he didn’t like the year of his birth: 1915. ‘An anodyne year: lost in wartime, undistinguished by any event; nobody well-known was born or died that year.’ Until quite late in life he played the unknown hero, the man whose obscurity – sometimes replaced by rapid mobility – was part of his fame.

‘Were I a writer, and dead, how I would love it if my life, through the pains of some friendly and detached biographer, were to reduce itself to a few details, a few preferences, a few inflections.’ Samoyault bravely quotes these lines from Barthes’s book Sade, Fourier, Loyola, and just as bravely ignores them: in part because Barthes had already played that friendly and detached role himself by writing a mock-critical study of a writer bearing his own name, and in part because she is the first biographer to have access to so many of Barthes’s friends and to the full Barthes archive of notes, letters, index cards and the rest. She takes her time and space – 715 pages in French – and is not afraid of the obvious and repetitive remark. Barthes’s childhood ‘to the age of nine’ is described in the next sentence as ‘his earliest years’. He ‘could not bring himself to keep a diary on a regular basis’; would we have guessed that ‘he did so only on an irregular ... basis’? I was especially taken by the ‘isolated village, where he enjoyed a certain solitude’ – it’s good to get away from it all.

Still, there are worse interpretative faults, and once she has got over the fact that Barthes’s father died at sea before the child was a year old, her excitement that la mer and la mère are homophones (‘Barthes would find it impossible to break the first, primitive attachment every child has with its mother, and the reason for this lies in the depths of the sea’), and the temptation to psychologise the act of writing (‘One has written only in order to suspend the body, to lessen its pressure, to lighten its weight, to mute the unease that it arouses’), Samoyault settles down to a patient, intelligent exploration of the details of a life that was all about details.

She follows Barthes on all his many travels, she tracks his friendships, she quotes him amply, and has some subtle and attentive things to say about his painting and about his love of music. We see his childhood in Bayonne, his schooldays in Paris, the war years in a series of sanatoria – ‘tuberculosis was incontestably the major event of his life.’ We join him in administrative and teaching posts in Bucharest and Alexandria after the war, and watch him putting his literary career together. He was always ready to learn – about structuralism from Greimas in Egypt, about Bakhtin and polyphony from Julia Kristeva in Paris – and always happy to recognise his debts: ‘I was surrounded by “formulators”, writers like Derrida, Sollers, Kristeva (always the same names, of course) who taught me things, persuaded me, opened my eyes.’ Brecht was also a revelation – he ‘wrote about every appearance made by the Berliner Ensemble on French soil’ – and even when his interest in live theatre faded, he still thought of ‘theatricality’ as an indispensable Brechtian move, ‘the main figure whereby signs are kept at a distance’, in Samoyault’s phrase. It’s not quite that signs are always intelligible for Barthes, as she suggests: ‘Against naturalness, against common sense, against the way History is forgotten, he sets the intelligibility of signs.’ But signs are always signs, waiting for the delayed arrival of their meanings or referents, and we are chronically eager to see this meeting as simple and inevitable, as if a smile could only mean kindness, and ‘I’ could only refer to me. Too long a delay or an entirely failed meeting can be a mess, but there is a form of intellectual freedom in the chance of these slippages.

Maurice Nadeau, introducing Barthes as a new contributor to the magazine Combat, said he was ‘fanatical about language’, and as Samoyault shows, this zeal took many forms. He was sometimes afraid of language, especially in its spoken versions, and he didn’t always believe in the freedom I have just described: ‘Words are not free; there is a spatial death of words.’ Late in life he notoriously said language was fascist – ‘because fascism is not the prevention of speech but the forced obligation to speak’. But for Barthes language was all about signs. Over time, he gave the liberated Brechtian marker – the object or image that could be shown as not colluding in the lies it was asked to tell – a great deal of attention, and his response to the saturated stereotype, the sign we can’t see because we so thoroughly take it for granted, was almost physical. In this sense early works like Mythologies, mid-career works like S/Z and late works like Camera Lucida, so different in other ways, reveal a remarkable consistency. Not all surprises are ‘festive’, but there is nothing worse, for Barthes, than the sickening, confident pile-up of everything we are entirely sure we know. He has a name for it: literally the discourse of other people, more idiomatically, the way people talk, and in S/Z he shows a character dying of it: ‘c’est du discours d’autrui, de son trop-plein de raisons qu’il meurt.’

These others are in our own heads, of course, that’s where they do the damage. They are us in many respects, or we are them. There is no lonely existential insight that will save us permanently from prejudice and platitude. But we can try thinking, and keep at it. In his later years Barthes was less keen on demythologising. The old myths remained as blatant and largely unquestioned as ever, but he realised more and more that myths can only be replaced by other myths. In his essay on Stendhal, Barthes even welcomes myth because it is alive, a ‘great mediating form’, but I don’t think this was because he had changed his mind significantly: he never thought myth was anything other than alive. The trick was to distinguish appealing and enabling myths from noxious ones. Frank Kermode, in The Sense of an Ending, written before Kermode came across Barthes, I think, but nevertheless a book that seems to have Barthes in mind, to be waiting for him, thought an attention to the difference between myth and fiction might do some of this work. Barthes thought the same and in a 1979 interview, speaking of Sartre, offered a sort of definition of his own method between the lines. He also suggested that while the idea of fiction can help us to see what is happening, it can’t do anything about the myth waiting in the shadows:

If it’s true that Sartre, with a philosophical puissance that I do not possess, tried to produce a complete system of thought, I would not say that he failed. In any case, no grand philosophical system succeeds on the scale of history: at some point it becomes a vast fiction, which it always was originally, moreover. I would say that Sartre produced a great philosophical fiction that was incarnated in different writings and that managed to take the form of a system.

History turns systems into the fictions they always were. This is not a matter of failure but of incarnation and writing. The difference between Sartre and Barthes is that the former sought a system and found one, while the latter was looking for something else: endless exact notations perhaps. Both men have a myth behind the fiction, and both myths, in this case, are worth having: they negotiate the impossible in different ways.

Samoyault’s​ loyalty to Barthes’s sense of signs means she is always ready to listen to different opinions. Generally this tendency just helps us to think for ourselves, but at times it makes her seem a little wobbly. About Barthes’s death, for example. On 25 February 1980, he stepped off the pavement of the rue des Ecoles in Paris – either carelessly or looking around quite carefully, depending on the testimony of different friends – and was hit by a van. He was taken to La Pitié-Salpêtrière, where he was found to have several fractures but not to be in a grave condition. He never left the hospital, though; he died on 26 March. Did he lose the will to live? Did his grieving for his mother, which was constant, interfere with his recovery? How serious was the flare-up of the old lung condition? There is also the idea of an ‘iatrogenic infection of the kind that is regularly contracted in hospitals’. The official verdict was that ‘the accident is not the immediate cause of death, but favoured the development of pulmonary complications.’ Samoyault is sure that Barthes ‘was not ... deliberately allowing himself to die’ because of his mother’s death; but not sure that he didn’t ‘lose the will to live’ because his book Camera Lucida was ‘not yet taken seriously’. The balance seems odd, and I don’t see why all these possibilities couldn’t have played a part. It is certainly true, as Foucault is quoted as saying, that ‘people do not realise how much effort is necessary to survive in a hospital.’ Samoyault leaves the question open – ‘what did Barthes die of?’ – but there are perhaps too many half-answers in the air.

This is certainly the case with the more difficult question of Barthes’s response to the Paris events of 1968. He was ‘bored’ and ‘wearied’ by many meetings, Samoyault says, and did not sign a crucial manifesto drawn up by his friends at the magazine Tel Quel. Does this mean that he ‘did not really feel concerned by May ’68’? He had a recurrence of his old illness, fainted in the street in April, was bleeding from the larynx in May, had bad ECG reports. This would surely be enough to keep him from taking part in a whole lot of demonstrations, but Samoyault is still on the defensive: ‘This ... is not an attempt to let Barthes off the hook for taking only a small part in the events.’ Not an attempt to inspect the hook either. When she says Barthes was engaged in ‘a painful re-examination of his place in the world’, she seems to reiterate rather than stave off the accusation of quietism. Structures don’t take to the streets; neither do painful re-examinations. What’s missing here, or is visible only across the blur of Samoyault’s analysis, is Barthes’s clear sense that the demonstrations and manifestos were too violent and too simple, too close to being mere mirrors of what they attacked, and the principle that people have a right to quietism even if we want them to behave differently, and even if we think they are wrong about the events. In one of the notes in the archive Barthes writes of being ‘on the trapeze without any safety net, ever since I’ve no longer had the nets of structuralism, semiology or Marxism.’ But he still has friends, he says, who hold the rope of the trapeze. It is dangerous to be ‘of one’s time’, whatever the time.

Credits:  This article first appeared in 2016 in London Review of Books.

The Tree (El árbol) by Maria Luisa Bombal

  To a great artist, Nina Anguita, a wonderful friend who gave life and reality to my imaginary tree, I dedicate this story that, without realizing it, I wrote for her, even long before I knew her. 

Carmen Guedez

The pianist sits down, coughs out of habit and thinks for moment. The streams of light that illuminate the hall begin to deepen into a dim splendor until the moment when a musical phrase rises into the silence and begins to expand, clear, direct, and joyfully capricious.

Mozart, perhaps, Brigida thinks. As usual, she has forgotten to ask for the program. “Mozart, or maybe Scarlatti…” She knew so little about music! And it wasn’t because she didn’t have an ear, or a fondness, for music. As a child, she insisted on taking piano lessons; no one had to make her do it, like her sisters. Her sisters, however, now played very well and were able to read music easily, while she… She had stopped taking lessons less than a year after she started. The reason for her inconsistency was as simple as it was shameful: she had never been able to learn the key of F. “I don’t understand, I don’t remember anything more that the key of G!” The indignation of her father! “I could have given the task of teaching several daughters of an unfortunate widower to anyone. Poor Carmen! She must have suffered a lot with Brigida. That creature is retarded” 

Brigida was the youngest of six daughters, all with different characters. When the father finally came to his sixth daughter, he was already so perplexed and exhausted by the first five that he preferred to simplify things by saying she was retarded. “I am not going to struggle any more, it’s useless. Just ignore her. If she doesn’t want to study, okay. If she wants to spend her time in the kitchen listening to fairly tales, that’s her problem. If she wants to play with dolls at age sixteen, so what.” And Brigida kept her dolls, and remained totally ignorant. 

How nice it is to be ignorant! Not to know exactly who Mozart was, not know his background, his influence, and the special features of his technique! Just to let herself be led by his hand, like now.

And Mozart leads her, in fact. He leads her across a bridge suspended over crystalline water that flows through a bed of pink sand. She is dressed in white, with a parasol as broad and smooth as a spider web opened over her shoulder.

“You look younger every day, Brigida. Yesterday I saw your husband, your ex husband I mean. His hair is completely white now.

But she doesn’t answer, nor does she stop, and she continues crossing the bridge that Mozart has extended for her toward the garden of her younger days.

There she saw tall fountains where the water sings. Her eighteen-year-old body, her chestnut tresses that drop to her ankles when they are untied, her golden complexion, her dark eyes, wide open and questioning. A small mouth with full lips, a sweet smile, and the most lively and graceful body in the world. What was she thinking about, sitting on the edge of the fountain? Nothing. “She is as foolish as she is pretty” they said. But she didn’t worry about being foolish or “being awkward” at dances. One by one they asked her sisters to marry, but no one asked her. 

Mozart! Now he offers her a blue marble staircase where she descends between a double row of frozen daylilies. And now she opens a gate of bars with golden tips so she can throw herself at the neck of Luis, an intimate friend of her father. Since she was a child, she would go to Luis when the others neglected her. He picked her up and she wrapped her arms around his neck with little giggles and planted kisses on his eyes, his forehead, and his hair that was already grey (wasn’t he ever young?) like a disorderly rainstorm. “You are a necklace,” Luis said. “You are like a necklace of birds.” 

That’s why she married him. Because, when she was with that solemn, taciturn man she didn’t feel responsible for being the way she was: foolish, playful, and lazy. Yes, now that years have passed she knows she hadn’t married Luis for love; nevertheless, she still doesn’t understand why, why one day she left him, suddenly… 

But then Mozart takes her nervously by the hand and, dragging her along with a rhythm that gets faster and faster, making her cross the garden in the opposite direction, going back over the bridge in a race that is almost an escape. And after having stripped her of her parasol, and her transparent skirt, Mozart closes the door to her past with a chord that was sweet and firm at the same time. And that leaves her in the concert hall, dressed in black, clapping mechanically while the light of the street lamps grows brighter.

Once again the half-light, and a moment of silence. And now Beethoven starts to stir up the warm sound of his notes, under a springtime moon. How far away the sea has gone! Brigida advances through the beach toward the sea spread out in the distance, refulgent and gentle, but then the sea rises up and calmly grows larger and, coming closer to her, covers her with soft waves that start pushing her, pushing her from behind until she feels her cheek pressing on the body of a man. And then it moves away leaving her, forgotten, on the chest of Luis. 

“You have no heart, you have no heart,” she used to tell Luis. It was beating so far inside her husband that she could only hear it unexpectedly, on rare occasions. “You are never really close to me when you’re by my side,” she protested in their bedroom when, before going to sleep, he always looked at the afternoon newspapers. “Why did you ever marry me?”

“Because you have the eyes of a frightened little deer,” he answered, and kissed her. And she, suddenly happy, gladly accepted the weight of his grey haired head over her shoulder. Oh, the bright, silvery hairs of Luis! 

“Luis, you haven’t ever told me exactly what color your hair was when you were a child, and you also haven’t told me what your mother said when your hair turned grey when you were only fifteen years old. What did she say? Did she laugh? Did she cry? And were you proud, or were you ashamed? And your friends in school, what did they say? Tell me, Luis, tell me…”

“I’ll tell you tomorrow. I’m sleepy, Brigida, I’m very tired. And turn off the light.”

He unconsciously moved away from her to go to sleep, and during the entire night she unconsciously leaned on her husband’s shoulder, searching for his breath, trying to live under his breath like an forgotten, thirsty plant that spreads its branches in search of a more propitious climate.

In the morning, when the housemaid opened the curtains, Luis was no longer by her side. He had gotten up stealthily, without telling her good morning, fearing that his “necklace of birds” would capture his shoulders again. “Five minutes, just five minutes. Your office won’t disappear just because you spend five more minutes with me, Luis.” Her awakenings. Oh, her sad awakenings! However, it was strange that as soon as she went to her dressing room, her sadness dissipated, as if with an enchantment.

A wave surges, it moves very far away, rustling like an ocean of leaves. Is that Beethoven? No.

It is the tree rubbing against the window of the dressing room. It was enough for her to enter the room for her to feel a great surge of wellbeing pass through her. How hot it always was in the morning in her bedroom! And the harsh light! Here in her dressing room, though, even the light was restful and refreshing. The pale chintz curtains, the tree that spread shadows like cold, roiling water on the walls, the mirrors that reflected the leaves and spread out into an immense green forest. How nice it was to be in this room! It was like a world sunken into an aquarium. How this giant rubber tree chatters! All the birds in the neighborhood come to live in it. It is the only tree on that narrow, sloping street that goes all the way down to the river from the edge of the city. 

"I am busy, I can’t go with you… I’ve got too much to do, I won’t be able to go to lunch… Hello, yes, I’m at the club with a commitment. Go eat and take a rest… No, I don’t know. It would be best if you didn’t wait for me, Brigida.”

“If she only had a few friends,” she sighed. But everyone seemed to be bored with her. If she tried to be a little less stupid! But how to cover so much ground in such a short time? In order to be intelligent, one has to start when you’re a child, isn’t that right?

Her sisters' husbands take to them to interesting places, but Luis, “why not admit it?” was ashamed of her, of her ignorance, of her timidity, and even the fact that she was only eighteen-years-old. Hadn’t he asked her once to say that she was twenty-one, as if her youthfulness was an unpleasant secret of theirs? 

And at night, how tired he always was! He never really listened to her. He smiled, yes, but she knew that his smile was mechanical. He showered her with caresses from which he was absent. Why had he married her? To continue a custom, or perhaps to strengthen his old friendly relationship with her father. 

Maybe for men life was a continuous series of accepted customs. If one happened to be broken, it must cause confusion and chaos. And then men started to wander through the streets of the city, to sit on a bench in the plaza, dressed more poorly every day, and with their beard even longer. Luis’s life, therefore, consisted filling every minute of the day with his job. How had she not realized that before? Her father was right in saying she was retarded.

“I would like to see it snow sometime, Luis”

“This summer I’ll take you to Europe and, since it will be winter there, you’ll be able to see it snow.”

“I know it’s winter there when it is summer here. I’m not that ignorant!”

Sometimes, to wake him out of his rapture into real love, she would throw herself over her husband and cover him with kisses, crying and calling him: “Luis, Luis, Luis…”

“What? What’s going on? What do you want?”

“Nothing.”

“Why did you call me like that, then?”

“No reason, I just wanted to call you. I like to say your name.” 

And he smiled, accepting that new game with benevolence.

Then summer came, the first summer after they were married. New duties kept him busy and prevented him from keeping his promise of a trip to Europe.

“Brigida, the heat is going to be awful this summer in Buenos Aires. Why don’t you go to the farm with your father?”

“By myself?” 

“I would go to see you every week, from Saturday to Monday.” 

She had sat down on the bed, feeling like insulting him. But she searched in vain for words to shout at him. She knew nothing, nothing at all. Not even how to insult. 

“What’s wrong? What are you thinking about, Brigida?”

For the first time, Luis came back after he left and leaned over her with concern, letting the time pass when he was supposed to arrive at his office. 

“I’m just tired…” Brigida had answered childishly, hiding her face in the pillows. For the first time he had also called her from the club during lunchtime. But she had refused to answer the phone, furiously brandishing the new weapon she had found: silence. That same night she had eaten supper in front of her husband without raising her eyes to look at him, with all of her nerves tensed.

“Are you still angry, Brigida?” 

But she didn’t break her silence. “You know very well that I love you, my necklace of birds. But I can’t be with you all the time. I’m a very busy man. By the time you reach my age, you have become the slave of a thousand different obligations.”

 Silence.

“Do you want to go out tonight?”

Silence.

“You don’t want to? All right then. Tell me, did Roberto call from Montevideo?”

Silence.

“What a pretty dress! Is it new?”

 Silence.

“Is it new, Brigida? Answer, answer me…” 

But she still didn’t break her silence. Then right away, unexpectedly, astonishingly, absurdly, Luis rose out of his chair and, violently throwing his napkin on the table, he left the house, slamming the door.

She rose up with astonishment, trembling with indignation after such injustice. “And I, and I,” she stammered disoriented, “I, who for almost a year… when, for the first time I let myself make a complaint… Well, I’m leaving, I’m leaving this very night! And I’ll never set foot in this house again…”  And she opened the closets in her dressing room with fury and frantically threw her clothes on the floor.

It was then when someone, or something knocked on the window. After that, without knowing why, or what made her do it, she ran toward the window. And she opened it. It was the tree, the rubber tree that a large gust of wind was rocking so its branches rubbed against the window, that was summoning her from outside so she would see it twist itself into an impetuous black flare under a sky that was full of stars on that summer night.

It wasn’t long before a heavy downpour began to fall on its leaves. What a delight! All night long she was able to hear the rain pouring on the rubber tree and flowing off the leaves like a cataract. All night long she heard the trunk of the old tree creak and moan, telling about the bad weather, while she was curled up under the sheets of the large bed, next to Luis. 

Handfuls of pearls that pour in streams, falling on a roof of silver. Chopin, Nocturnes of Federico Chopin.

How many times had she awakened early to find that her husband, now also stubbornly silent, had silently slipped out of bed?

The dressing room: the window wide open, the smell of the river and the pasture floating through that beneficent room, and the mirrors blurred by a halo of mist.

Chopin and the rain that falls on the leaves of the rubber tree, sounding like the noise of a secret waterfall that even seems to drench the roses on the curtains, and mingles with her turbulent nostalgia. 

What to do in the summer when it rains so often? Stay in her room all day, pretending she was recovering from depression? Luis had quietly come in one afternoon. He had sat down next to her, looking tense. There was a moment of silence.

“Brigida, is it true that you no longer love me?” 

She had foolishly cheered up for a moment. She could have shouted, “No, no, I love you Luis, I love you,” if only he had waited, if he had not seemed so pleased by her unusual calmness. 

“Whatever it is, I don’t think we ought to separate, Brigida. We need to take plenty of time to think about it. 

Her feelings shut down just as quickly as they had appeared. Why get excited uselessly. Luis loved her with tenderness and care; if sometime he ever came to hate her, it would be justified. And that was how life is. She went over to the window and pressed her forehead against the cold glass. There the tree was peacefully receiving the rain that fell on it calmly and regularly. The room became immobilized in the systematic and silent darkness. Everything seemed to stop, permanently and quietly. That’s how life is. And there was a certain grandness in accepting it that way, mediocre, like something definite and unchangeable. Meanwhile, a melody of serious and dignified words seemed to rise from the depths of things, and she remained there listening: “Always.” “Never…” 

And thus time passes by, the hours, the days, and the years. Always! Never! That was how life is, that was life!

Once she recovered, she realized her husband had slipped out of the room. Always! Never!...  

And the rain, secret and tranquil, still kept on humming notes of Chopin.

Summer stripped the sheets off its burning calendar. Luminous and blinding pages fell off like golden swords, as well as pages of unhealthy humidity like the breath of swamps; also falling were the furious pages of a brief storm, as well as pages of a hot wind, a wind that brings the “flower of the air” and hangs it on the immense rubber tree. 

Some children were playing hide-and-seek between the enormous convulsed roots that rose up so high they lifted the paving stones, so the tree was filled with laughter and whispering. Then she leaned out of the window and clapped her hands; the children scattered away fearfully, without noticing the smile of the girl who would have also liked to participate in their game.

She stayed by herself for a long time, looking out the window, watching the branches rock—on that street that sloped down to the river there was always some wind—and it was like sinking her eyes into moving water, or in the restless smoke from a chimney. One would be able to spend hours, drained of all thoughts, feeling the enchantment of that well-being.

The room had scarcely begun to be filled with the dim light of dusk when she lit the first lamp, and the first lamp was reflected in the mirrors so that it was multiplied like a firefly that wanted to hasten the arrival of night.

Every night she slept next to Luis, suffering by fits and starts. But when her pain increased until it struck her like a stab wound, or when she was seized by a desire to wake Luis and slap him, or caress him, she would slip out of the room on tiptoes to her dressing room, and open the window. Right away the room was filled with discreet sounds and discreet presences, with mysterious footsteps, with delicate fluttering, with the rustling of foliage, and with the gentle chirp of a cricket that was hidden beneath the bark of the rubber tree that was immersed in the stars on that warm summer night.

Her fever dissipated as her bare feet cooled, little by little, on the floor mat. She didn’t know why it was so easy to suffer back there in that room. 

The melancholy of Chopin was spilling out in one movement after another, and also in one melancholy after another, unfazed.

And autumn came. The dry leaves fell off and floated around before falling over the grass of the small garden, or over the pavement of the sloping street. The leaves broke off and fell… The top of the tree was still green, but further down the tree was turning red, and then darkening like the worn lining of a sumptuous dancing cape. And now the room seemed to be sunken into a sad golden cup.

Lying on the couch, she was waiting patiently for supper time and the unlikely arrival of Luis. He had started speaking to her again, and she had resumed being his wife again, without enthusiasm, and without anger. She no longer loved him, but she no longer suffered. On the contrary, an unexpected feeling of plentitude and tranquility had taken possession of her. Now, no one or nothing could hurt her. Perhaps true happiness lies in the conviction that that one has irremediably lost all possibility of happiness. Then we begin to live a life without hope or fears, finally able to enjoy all the small pleasures that are the most enduring.

There was a tremendous noise and a white flash that knocked her back, trembling. Is it the intermission? No, it’s the rubber tree, she knows it must have been. 

They had brought it down with a single blow of an axe. She had not heard the sound of the work that had begun early that morning. “The roots had been lifting up the paving stones of the street, so naturally, the neighborhood commission…”

Dazed, she has placed her hands over her eyes. When she recovers her vision, she sits up and looks around. What does she look at? 

The concert hall suddenly lighted up, where the people are leaving?

No, she has been trapped in the roots of her past and can’t leave her dressing room. Her dressing room now invaded by a terrifying white light. It was as if they had torn off the ceiling of her room and a harsh light came in from all sides, leaking into her pores, burning her with coldness. And she saw everything in the light of this cold light. Luis, with his wrinkled face, his hands that are covered with thick discolored veins, the lurid colors of the chintz curtains.

Terrified, she rushes to the window. The window now looks out over a narrow street, so narrow that her room almost touches the façade of a dazzling skyscraper. On its ground floor, windows, and more windows filled with bottles. On the corner of the street a string of cars are lined up in front of a service station that has been painted red. Some boys in shirt sleeves are bouncing a ball in the middle of the pavement.

And all that ugliness had entered into her mirrors. In her mirrors, there were now nickel-plated balconies, clotheslines with hanging rags, and cages with canaries.

They had destroyed her intimacy, her secret; she found herself naked in the middle of the street, naked next to an old husband who turns his back to go to sleep, who has never given her any children. She doesn’t understand why, until now, she has never wanted to have children, or how she had come to accept the idea that she was going to live all her life without children. She doesn’t understand how she could stand the laughter of Luis for a whole year, his laughter that was too jovial, that false laughter of a man who has trained himself to laugh, because on certain occasions it is necessary.

Lies! Her resignation and her calmness were lies. She wanted love, yes love, as well as trips, and doing crazy things, and love, especially love… “ 

But, Brigida, why are you leaving? Why did you stay here?” Luis had asked her.

Now she would have known how to answer him: “The tree, Luis, the tree! They have cut down the rubber tree.”

Notes: María Luisa Bombal was born in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1910. Her first stories were published by the Argentine magazine Sur, which subsequently published La Ultima niebla (House of Mist) and La amortajada (The Shrouded Woman).  She translated her two novels into English and they were published by Farrar, Straus.  Bombal died in Chile in 1980.  Please see The Modern Novel for more information.

Fragment of "Elegy and Choros" by H.D.

 

Electra:  

No one knows,

the heart of a child,

how it grows

until it is too late,

no one knows hate

but worse,

too late,

no one knows

love:

when she came

there was the whole earth in flame,

every hill,

every bush

must blush

rose

rose

rose

O, rhodedendron-name,

mother;

no one knows the color of a flower

till it is broken

Notes:  The complete version of the poem can be found at Poetry Foundation.

The Sluts and the Saints: A Letter to Zézim

by

Caio Fernando Abreau

(translation Brunas Danta Lobato)

Porto, December 22 of 1979

Zézim,

I just got back from the beach, I was there some five days, completely alone (amazing!), and found your letter. These few days here, ten, and it already feels like a month, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I’m worried, Zézim, and want to talk to you. Please be quiet and listen, or read it, rather, you must be full of Adélia Pradian vibes and therefore a little too focused on small mysteries. It’s a long letter, so get ready, because I already got ready over here with a cup of Mu tea, cushion under my butt, and a pack of Galaxy, the pseudo-intelligent decision.

So here: out of the few lines in your letter, twelve sentences end with question marks. They are, therefore, questions. I answer some. The solution, I agree, is not in restraint. It never is, nor will it ever be. I’ve always thought that the two most fascinating kinds of people in the world were the sluts and the saints, and they’re both entirely unrestrained, right? You don’t have to abstain; you have to eat of the banquet, Zézim. No one will teach you the way. No one will teach me the way. No one has ever taught me the way, or taught you, I suspect. I move blindly. There are no ways to be taught or learned. In reality, there are no such pathways. I’m now reminded of a verse from a Peruvian poet (is it Vallejo? I’m not sure): “Caminante, no hay camino. Pero el camino se hace al andar.” [sic]

And more: I’ll admit that I, too, have thought, what if God breaks down? And it’ll happen, it’ll happen because you said, “God is my last hope.” Zézim, I care so much about you, please don’t think of me as unbearably condescending for saying this, but you’re too stubborn, Zézim. There’s no last hope besides death. The one who seeks doesn’t find. You have to be distracted and expect nothing at all. There’s nothing to expect. Nor unexpected. It’s all maya / illusion. Or samsara / vicious circle.

Right, I’ve read too much Zen Buddhism, I’ve done too much yoga, I have this thing where I have to keep playing with magic, I’ve read too much Krishnamurti, you know? And also Alan Watts, and D. T. Suzuki, and this often seems a bit ridiculous to people. But I’ve taken for my personal use at least a certain tranquility from these.

You ask: what do I do now? Don’t do, I say. Don’t do anything, while doing everything, waking up every day, making coffee, making the bed, walking around the block, listening to music, feeding the Poor. You’re anxious and that’s not very religious of you. Shocking: I think you’re not very religious. Really. You’ve stopped burning smoke to find God. What on earth? You’re replacing weed with baby Jesus? Zézim, I’ll tell you a deplorable cliché now, here we go: you won’t find anything outside of yourself. The way is in not out. You’re not going to find it in God or in weed, or moving to New York, or.

You want to write. Right, but do you want to write? Or everyone demands it from you and you feel that you have to write? I know it’s not that simple, and that there are thousands of other things involved here. But maybe you might be confused because everyone keeps asking, what’s going on, where’s the book? Where’s the novel, where’s the novella, where’s that play? Fuck them, demons. Zézim, you only have to write if it comes from the inside out, otherwise it won’t work, I’m sure of it, you could fool a few, but you wouldn’t fool yourself, so it wouldn’t fill this void. There are no demons between you and the typewriter. What there is instead is a matter of basic honesty. This simple question: do you really want to write? Ignoring the demands, do you continue to want it? Then go ahead, search deep, as a gaúcho poet once said, Gabriel de Britto Velho, “stub out the cigarette on your chest / tell yourself what you don’t like to hear / tell everything.” That’s writing. Drawing blood with your nails. And it doesn’t matter the form, it doesn’t matter its “social role,” nothing, it doesn’t matter that at first it might merely be some self-exorcism. But you have to bleed abun-dant-ly. Aren’t you afraid of this surrender? Because it hurts, hurts, hurts. The frightening loneliness. The only reward is what Laing says that is the only thing that can save us from madness, from suicide, from self-erasure: a feeling of inner glory. This phrase is very important in my life.

I knew Clarice Lispector fairly well. She was the unhappiest, Zézim. After the first time we talked I cried all night, because her whole existence hurt me, because it seemed to hurt her too, out of so much bleeding understanding of everything. I’m telling you about her because Clarice, to me, is what I know best of magnificent, literarily speaking. And she died alone, cheated, unloved, misunderstood, known as “a little crazy.” Because she gave herself entirely to her job of creating. Dove deep in her own trip and went inventing her own ways, in the greatest loneliness. Like Joyce. Like Kafka, crazy too, except that in Prague. Like Van Gogh. Like Artaud. Like Rimbaud.

Is that the kind of creator you want to be? Then give yourself over and pay the price. Which, too often, is too high. Or do you want to write a competent little book to be released with hors d’oeuvres and suspicious whiskey on a pleasant afternoon at Livraria Cultura, with everyone you know celebrating? I don’t think so. I’ve known and know too many people like that. And I won’t give a penny for any of them. You, I love. I’m rarely wrong.

Zézim, search through your memory, your childhood, your dreams, your passions, your failures, your sorrows, your wildest hallucinations, your most unreasonable hopes, your sickest fantasies, your most homicidal desires, in everything that’s seemingly the most unutterable, the most abominable guilts, the stupidest lyricisms, the most general confusion, the bottom of the bottomless well that is the subconscious: that’s where your work is.

Most important of all, don’t go looking for it: it comes to you, when you and it are ready. Each writer has their process, you need to understand yours. Perhaps, this thing that seems enormously difficult is simply your sub or unconscious’ gestation.

And reading, reading is food for anyone who writes. Many times you’ve told me that you couldn’t read anymore. That you didn’t like reading anymore. If you don’t like reading, how will you like writing? Or go ahead and write to destroy the text, but then feed yourself. Lavishly. Then throw up. To me, and this might be personal, writing is sticking your finger down your throat. Then, of course, you sift through the goop, mold it, transform it. There might even be a flower. But the defining moment is the finger in the throat. And I think — and I could be wrong — that this is what you haven’t been able to do. You know, when you’re drunk as shit, no one else’s finger is willing to go into your throat.

Or then go to therapy. I mean it. Or try swimming. Or modern dance. Or a radical macrobiotic diet. Anything that will take care of your mind and/or body and, at the same time, will distract you from this obsession. Until it’s resolved, by force or on its own, it doesn’t matter. I just don’t want to see you choking like this, my dear friend.

Pause.

As for me, I was telling you about these past few days at the beach. That’s it, I woke up at six, seven in the morning, headed to the beach, ran some four kilometers, exercised, at around ten I headed back, to cook my rice. I rested a little, then sat down and wrote. I’d be exhausted by then. I was exhausted. I spent my days talking to myself, submerged in text, I managed to force it out. It was a shred that had come to me in September, back in Sãopa. Then it came, without my planning for it. It was ready in my head. It was called “Moldy Strawberries,” it’ll have an epigraph from Lennon & McCartney, I have the lyrics of “Strawberry Fields Forever” here waiting to be translated. Zézim, I think it’s so good. I was completely blind while I was writing it, a character (an adman, former hippie, who insists he has cancer in the soul, or brain damage caused by too many drugs, from past carnavais, and the symptom — which is real — is this persistent taste of moldy strawberries in his mouth) stopped in his tracks and refused to die or go completely mad at the end. It has a beautiful ending, positive, joyful. I was stunned. The ending made its way into the text and wouldn’t let me interfere. So weird. Sometimes I think that when I write I’m just a transmission channel, say, between two things totally alien to me, I’m not sure you know what I mean. A transmission channel with a certain power, or ability, selective, I don’t know. This morning I didn’t go to the beach and finally finished the story, I think already in its fourth version. But I’ll let it sleep for at least a month, then I’ll reread it — because I know I could always be wrong, and my current eyes might be unable to see certain things.

Then I took notes, a lot of notes, for other things. The mind boils over. It’s so great, Zézim, it’s great, it isn’t dead, and that’s all I want, I’ll quit all my jobs out there the moment I feel that this, literature, which is all I have, is under threat — like it was, at Nova.

And I read. I found out I love Dalton Trevisan. Boy, was I screaming while I read Knife in the Heart, it has some incredible stories, and so meticulously faceted, polished down to its gleaming essence, especially one of them, called “Woman on Fire.” I’ve read almost all of Ivan Ângelo, I also really like it, especially The Real Son of a Bitch, but then the title story put me to sleep and I stopped. But he has such a text, oh that he has. And a lot of it. But the best thing I’ve read these days wasn’t fiction. It was a short article by Nirlando Beirão in the latest Istoé (from December 19, please read it), called “The Rebirth of a Dream.” I’ve read it so many times. The first time, I was moved to tears — because he contextualizes all the experiences I’ve had in this decade. Of course he’s talking about an entire generation, but then I realized, my God, look how I’m so ordinary, so typical of my generation. It ends in utter joy: reinstating the dream. It’s so beautiful. And so bold. It’s new, healthy. A light bulb went off in my head, you know when something lights you up? Just as if he’d given shape to what I, confusingly, had only ever groped for in the dark. Read it, tell me what you think. I couldn’t refrain from it and wrote him a letter saying that. I’m not his friend, only an acquaintance, but I think we should say certain things.

When I’m writing, I talk a hell of a lot, don’t I?

Things are good at home. It’s always a great energy, it’s no use criticizing it. Their good energy doesn’t depend on any opinions I might have on it, isn’t it amazing? The house is kind of under renovation, Nair is building a kind of winter garden out back, will connect it to the living room. Today she was pissed because Felipe won’t be applying to college anymore: he failed his senior year again. My sister Cláudia got a Caloi 10 bike for christmas from her fiancé (Jorge, remember?), and I took it and just earlier today went on a great ride around Menino Deus. Márcia looks pretty, more grown up, sort of with an air of a younger Mila. Zaél is cooking, today made rice with raisins for dinner.

Other people, I haven’t seen. I’ve heard that A Comunidade is in theaters now and I have a paycheck coming up. Tomorrow I think I’ll check it out.

I’m so lonely, Zézim. So me-me-with-myself, because my me with family is only in passing. It’s good like this, I’m not afraid of any of my emotions or fantasies, you know? The days of total loneliness at the beach were especially healthy.

You’ve seen the new Nova? There is mister Chico, stuttering, and a very funny picture showing everyone at the newsroom — me looking like “I don’t want to get involved, I have nothing to do with this.” Check it out later. Speaking of which, Juan stopped by, I was at the beach, he talked to Nair over the phone, he was getting off one bus and getting on another. He said he’ll be back on January or February third, Nair doesn’t remember, to stay for a few days. Will he stay? And nothing will happen. Someone told me once that I would never love in a way that “would work,” otherwise I would stop writing. It could be. Small miracles. When I finished Moldy Strawberries, I wrote in the margins, without realizing, “creation is a sacred thing.” It’s more or less what Chico says at the end of his article. It’s mysterious, sacred, wonderful.

Zézim, give me updates, many, and soon. I didn’t imagine I would miss you this much. I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but I go on staying. I want to write more, go back to the beach, document everything. I’ve even thought: later on, when I’m about to return, wouldn’t you like to come join me? We could do that same thing again, we’d return together. My family loves you madly, today there was even a bit of commotion because everyone wanted to read Chico’s article at the same time.

Let me take you down
’cause I’m going to strawberry fields
nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about
strawberry fields forever
strawberry fields forever
strawberry fields forever

That’s what I wish you for the new decade. Zézim, let’s go. No last hopes. We have brand-new hopes, every day. And none, besides living fully, more comfortable inside ourselves, without guilt, that’s it. Let me take you: I’m going to strawberry fields.

Tell me about Adélia.

And take care, please, take care of yourself. Any darker waters, dial 0512-33-41-97. I can at least listen to you. And please don’t mind any harshness on my part. It’s because I care about you. To quote Guilherme Arantes, to finish this off: “I want to see you healthy / always in a good mood / full of good will.

A kiss from

Caio

PS — Hugs to Neilo. To Ana Matos and Nino, too.

Credits:  This letter with the translator's note originally appeared in 2019 in Los Angeles Review of Books.

Wislawa Szymborska's "In Praise of Dreams"

Natalia Valenyuk

In my dreams 

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek
and not only with the living.

I drive a car
which obeys me.

I am talented,
I write long, great poems.

I hear voices
no less than the major saints.

You would be amazed
at my virtuosity on the piano.

I float through the air as is proper,
that is, all by myself.

Falling from the roof
I can softly land on green grass.

I don't find it hard
to breathe under water.

I can't complain:
I've succeeded in discovering Atlantis.

I'm delighted that just before dying
I always manage to wake.

Right after the outbreak of war
I turn over on my favorite side.

I am but I need not
be a child of my time.

A few years ago
I saw two suns.

And the day before yesterday a penguin.
With the utmost clarity.

Walter Benjamin's Last Work

by

Samantha Rose Hill 

WHEN HANNAH ARENDT escaped the Gurs internment camp in the middle of June 1940, she did not go to Marseilles to find her husband Heinrich Blücher — she went to Lourdes to find Walter Benjamin. For nearly two weeks they played chess from morning to night, talked, and read whatever papers they could find.

Arendt and Benjamin met in exile in Paris in 1933 through her first husband, Günther Anders, who was a distant cousin of Benjamin’s. They would frequent a café on the rue Soufflot to talk politics and philosophy with Bertolt Brecht and Arnold Zweig. And while Arendt’s marriage to Anders didn’t last, her friendship with Benjamin grew and flourished during the war years.

Arendt hesitated leaving Benjamin in Lourdes. She knew he was in a wobbly state of mind, anxious about the future, talking about suicide. Benjamin feared being interned again, and he had difficulty imagining life in the United States. Arendt wrote to Gershom Scholem that the “war immediately terrified him beyond all measure” and “[h]is horror at America was indescribable.” His strained relationship with Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research (also known as the Frankfurt School) left him in a state of financial precarity. The tenuous flow of correspondence conducted through networks of friends and letters (when they arrived) complicated matters more, leaving one dependent upon time itself. Benjamin, already an anxious man, stopped going out and “was living in constant panic.”

When Benjamin was released from the Clos St. Joseph internment camp in Nevers in the spring of 1940, he returned to Paris for a brief period before fleeing to Lourdes around June 14, en route to Marseilles. It was during this time that he wrote what would become his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” or as it is also translated, “On the Concept of History.”

The documents of Walter Benjamin’s death are plural. What information we have about his final days comes from Lisa Fittko and Henny Gurland (Erich Fromm’s wife), who led a small group of refugees through the Pyrenees to Portbou, a common route of escape for refugees at the time. Fittko describes how Benjamin had to walk for 10 minutes, then rest for a minute, given his poor health. He carried only a leather attaché case, which contained his most valuable papers. Upon arriving in Portbou on the night of September 26, 1940, they were told at the police station that the Spanish border had been closed, and that without French exit papers they would be returned and sent to camps. That night, Walter Benjamin took a lethal dose of morphine. Gurland was the last person to see him alive, and this is important, because she wrote what essentially became his will. According to her, Benjamin died on September 27. The Spanish doctor’s death certificate declares that Benjamin died from a cerebral hemorrhage on September 26 (perhaps an attempt to cover up the suicide). The municipal certificate shows that he was buried on September 27. Another burial record is dated September 28. Hannah Arendt writes to Gershom Scholem that Benjamin died on September 29.

We will never know what happened to Walter Benjamin, or his leather attaché case, but we do know (in part) what happened with his final work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.”

The afterlife of Benjamin’s “Theses” is embroiled in turmoil. Benjamin was anxious about the publication of his papers, and he was doubly anxious that the Institute would edit his work and publish it in the United States without his approval. Arendt was anxious that Adorno and Horkheimer would censor Benjamin’s work. Adorno was anxious that Arendt would try to publish Benjamin’s work without his consent. Scholem was anxious that Adorno wouldn’t publish Benjamin’s work at all.

Before Benjamin’s death, he dispersed his papers widely among his friends: Scholem had most of Benjamin’s essays in Palestine; Georges Bataille was hiding the Arcades Project, among other papers, and the Klee painting in the French National Library where he worked; Gretel Adorno had a number of writings in New York; and Arendt had copies of Benjamin’s literary and philosophical essays. These and other copies were hand-transcribed by Benjamin himself.

A few months after Benjamin’s suicide, Arendt and Blücher made their way from Marseilles to Portbou to Lisbon. As they sailed to New York in the spring of 1941, they read the “Theses” aloud to their fellow passengers. And a couple days after arriving in New York, Arendt took a suitcase with Benjamin’s work to Adorno and Horkheimer at West 117th Street. She left Benjamin’s papers with the Institute, but refused to hand over her copy of the “Theses.” She made them make copies instead.

From Arendt’s correspondence, it’s clear that she never quite believed Benjamin entrusted the execution of his literary estate to Adorno. At the very least, she never trusted Adorno to actually publish Benjamin’s papers. This is complicated by the fact that Benjamin left no real will, or if he did, it was lost. The instruction to give his papers to Adorno comes secondhand through Gurland, who claimed that she felt it necessary to destroy Benjamin’s final message, a suicide note of sorts. As we have it, she rewrote Benjamin’s last letter from memory and passed it on. The five sentences read:  In a situation presenting no way out, I have no other choice but to make an end of it. It is in a small village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will come to a close [va s’achever].  I ask you to transmit my thoughts to my friend Adorno and to explain to him the situation in which I find myself. There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write.

The last letter Benjamin sent Adorno is dated August 2, 1940, and chronicles his anxieties about his papers:  I spoke to Felizitas [Gretel Adorno] about the complete uncertainty in which I find myself concerning my writings. (I have relatively less reason to fear for the papers devoted to the Arcades than for the others.) As you know, however, things are such that my personal situation is no better than that of my writings …

In all of Benjamin’s fretfulness about his papers, there is no request in this letter that Adorno publish his work. In fact, quite the opposite. He goes on to write: “The complete uncertainty about what the next day and even the next hour will bring has dominated my existence for many weeks,” which is followed by this admonition:  I hope that I have thus far given you the impression of maintaining my composure even in difficult moments. Do not think that this has changed. But I cannot close my eyes to the dangerous nature of the situation. I fear that those who have been able to extricate themselves from it will have to be reckoned with one day.

Benjamin’s final letter to Arendt, written August 9, 1940, from Lourdes, concerns his exit papers and decision to head to Marseilles, where he would need to collect his papers for emigration. He mentions his “deep anguish” about the fate of his manuscripts and notes that he has had little contact from friends, but that he is keeping his spirits up by reading. On September 20, Benjamin, Arendt, and Blücher were reunited in Marseille. On September 25 or 26, Benjamin left for Portbou.

Benjamin had seen Theodor and Gretel Adorno for the last time in December 1938 in San Remo, Italy, before their departure to New York. During their days in San Remo, they talked about their respective work. Adorno shared his In Search of Wagner with Benjamin, and Benjamin discussed transforming his Baudelaire project with Adorno. (Adorno would later use this meeting to argue to Arendt that Benjamin had entrusted him with his work because he knew it best.)

The “Theses,” a collection of philosophical fragments on historicism and historical materialism, were originally written on the backs of colorful envelopes — green, yellow, orange, blue, cream. The cramped passages in tiny script illustrate the conditions of exile: he is saving space because he is short on paper. As a text, the “Theses” marry Benjamin’s interests in Marxism and theology, reflecting on temporality and the possibility of a weak messianism to interrupt the flow of empty homogeneous, capitalist time. The most famous fragment, which lies at the heart of the work, was inspired by Paul Klee’s painting Angelus Novus, which Benjamin purchased in 1921, and which inspired a birthday gift from Scholem: a poem titled “Greetings from the Angelus on July 15.” The painting accompanied Benjamin for some 20 years of his life, and, as he describes it, pictures the angel of history being blown backward into the future by the forces of progress piling ruins at his feet.

The stack of empty envelopes, now tucked away in a manila folder in Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress, bear Benjamin’s last work and final Paris address — 10, rue Dombasle, Paris 15e. They were written for a future he would never know. As Benjamin writes in one thesis: There is no document of civilization, that is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

After his visit with Adorno, Benjamin returned to Paris. During the winter of 1938–1939 he had frequent meetings with Arendt. A circle of German émigrés had formed around them, as one of Benjamin’s biographers describes it, and they held regular discussions in Benjamin’s apartment. In exile, Arendt, not Adorno, had become Benjamin’s primary interlocutor. That February, Scholem arrived in Paris on his way to New York and visited with Arendt and Benjamin. And it was these conversations with Arendt about Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism that most informed “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” When Benjamin finished the “Theses” in late April, early May 1940, he sent a copy to Gretel in New York, with a note:  The war and the constellation that brought it about led me to take down a few thoughts which I can say that I have kept with me, indeed kept from myself, for nigh on twenty years. […] Even today, I am handing them to you more as a bouquet of whispering grasses, gathered on reflective walks, than a collection of theses.

Who ought execute Benjamin’s literary estate, then, is not clear from his final correspondence. From reading his letters, it appears that he was closer to Gretel Adorno than Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and even Arendt. Gurland’s secondhand note is presumably authentic, but we can never know. What we do know is that everyone has tried to claim Benjamin since his death, and the struggle among Arendt, Adorno, and Scholem to publish the “Theses,” among other works, led to an open air of suspicion and masked hostility.

A few weeks after arriving in New York, Arendt moved to Massachusetts to live with an American family as an au pair so she could learn English. While there, she received word from the Institute that they had misplaced a couple of Benjamin’s writings that were in the suitcase she had delivered. Which ones? We don’t know. But Arendt did not believe that they had been lost. She believed that Adorno intentionally misplaced them so that he would not have to publish them. She saw it as an act of censorship, a continuation of Adorno’s mistreatment of Benjamin’s work since the so-called Baudelaire controversy, in which Adorno had critiqued and rejected Benjamin’s Baudelaire essay for not being Marxist or dialectical enough. She wrote to Blücher on August 2, 1941:  This morning I received the enclosed letter of doom. I am quite distraught at the chutzpa and the naïve effrontery of writing something like that to me. But that’s the least of the problems. I take it that the group of bastards is of the same opinion and that they will simply suppress the manuscript. It’s quite a stroke luck in the circumstances that I have the manuscript. After all, I was obligated to give it to them, knowing that Benji had sent them a copy which never arrived. Snubby [Arendt’s pet name for Blücher], please, please, say something. I’m all alone and so horribly desperate and frightened because they do not seem to be willing to print it. And so terribly furious that I could murder the whole lot of them. If only one could write to Palestine, maybe Scholem could have it properly published with Schocken [Verlag] — who, N.B., is in New York. But I’d have to know first if the stupid asses are not going to take it. And, bastards that they are, they will never give me a straight answer. They’ll just keep stringing us along. We certainly won’t be able to lecture them on loyalty to a dead friend. They’ll avenge themselves, the way Benji basically avenged himself by writing this.

It would not be an understatement to say Arendt hated Adorno. After meeting him in Frankfurt in the 1920s, she remarked: That one will never come in my house! Her dislike was personal and political. She blamed Adorno for her first husband’s failed habilitation, thought he had strong-armed Benjamin into rewriting his Baudelaire essay, and found the Freudo-Marxism of the Frankfurt School to be transparently ideological. Since the early 1930s, Benjamin’s stipend from the Institute for Social Research was his primary source of income. Around 1935, Benjamin met with Friedrich Pollock, who agreed to double his monthly stipend from 500 francs to 1,000 francs to write The Paris Arcades. A few years later in 1938, and a couple months after Adorno rejected Benjamin’s work on Baudelaire, he received a letter from Max Horkheimer informing him that his stipend would likely be canceled because of the financial circumstances of the Institute. Benjamin was plunged into one depression after the next at the hands of Adorno and Horkheimer, and Arendt saw the “misplaced papers” as a continuation of Benjamin’s mistreatment by the Institute for Social Research.

This is the backdrop of Arendt’s letter to Blücher. Similarly, she wrote to Scholem shortly after arriving in the United States: “I can’t get a word out of Wiesengrund [Adorno]. I talked to him when he was here, but after he left for California he hasn’t mentioned it again. You know what I think about these gentlemen…” Arendt spared no word talking about the “bastards.”

It took nearly two years after Benjamin’s death for Adorno and Horkheimer to publish something, and even then it was Gretel Adorno who did the work. In 1942, Gretel produced a limited-edition mimeograph of Benjamin’s writings, titled Walter Benjamin zum Gedächtnis (In Memory of Walter Benjamin). It took five more years for Benjamin’s “Theses” to appear in print in the journal Les Temps modernes — and five more for a two-volume selection of his collected writings to be published by Suhrkamp Verlag.

When Arendt received her copy of the 1942 mimeograph in the mail, she was furious. The somber tomb of pale typescript was sandwiched between two sheets of black construction paper. Not only did Adorno and Horkheimer fail to publish Benjamin’s work properly, but they did not even bother to bind it. She exclaimed to Scholem:  I’m writing in a rush just to let you know that the Institute has published a mimeographed volume in memory of Benjamin, which wasn’t even bound when they send it out. The only thing you’ll find in it from his literary estate is his “Historical-Philosophical Theses,” which I had brought with me. What I very much fear is that this will be it, and all the rest of his work they’ll bury away in the archives. It was a little more difficult for them to do it with the “Theses” because so many people knew about it, and because I was the one who gave it to them in the first place. As for the rest of the volume, there is an essay by Horkheimer and one by Adorno.

Arendt edited her copy with a blue marker, and made an interlinear translation of part of the famous Angelus Novus fragment:  ...unremittingly ruin on ruin piles and lands there at his feet. He wishes he could stay to rouse the dead and to join together the fragments. But a wind blown from paradise got caught in his wings and is so strong that the angel can no more close them. This wind drives him unsparingly in the future so that he turns his back while the pile of ruin before him towers to the skies. What we call progress is this wind.

The “Theses” stood at the center of Arendt and Adorno’s dispute about the publication of Benjamin’s work, because Arendt retained her copy. Part of the controversy appears to stem from the fact that Arendt didn’t know Benjamin wrote as many as six copies of the “Theses” — entrusting one to Gretel Adorno — though she was aware that he had told many people about them.

In 1947, Adorno heard a rumor that Arendt was publishing Benjamin’s works without his permission and wrote to remind her that Benjamin had entrusted him with the publication of his papers. Adorno adds that he understood the “philosophical landscape” of Benjamin’s work better than anyone because of their discussions in San Remo:  I have heard from several sources that Schocken Verlag is planning [an] edition of Benjamin's writings, and Ms. Maier has now informed me that the plan falls to your responsibility. I hardly have to tell you how I would welcome such [an] edition. Perhaps it is not unimportant for the plan for you to know that Walter Benjamin has entrusted me with his entire literary estate, and that just now the manuscripts of the Arcades Project that were hidden in Paris during the war, and that probably contain the most important theoretical designs of his late work, have arrived in New York and are being kept there until there is an absolutely safe way for me to receive the irreplaceable material. I myself have in my possession the parts of Benjamin’s archive that he carried with him.

When I saw Benjamin for the last time, in January 1938 in San Remo, it was agreed between us that I should give a more comprehensive picture of his philosophical intentions. It seems to me that the execution of this plan, which we had discussed in detail, is not merely the fulfillment of a binding duty, but I also believe that I am not immodest if I regard myself as [more] qualified for the task than anyone else, both because of my intimate familiarity with Benjamin's intellectual landscape and because of the central consistency of our philosophy. Perhaps the edition would provide the opportunity to realize that plan.

Arendt and Scholem were skeptical that Adorno had actually acquired the Arcades Project from Bataille. And we know now that not all of them were delivered, since some remained hidden until the 1980s when they were discovered by accident in the French National Library by Giorgio Agamben. Still, there was not much that Arendt or Scholem could do. Adorno published the two-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings with Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955.

Dissatisfied with the German editions and committed to the afterlife Benjamin’s work, Arendt set out to publish two new volumes of Benjamin’s essays, what would become Illuminations and Reflections. When she began working on the first English-language edition in the spring of 1967, she wrote to Adorno, because she noticed some “variants” between her copy of the “Theses” and the German editions he had published. She was concerned that there were some “not insignificant” changes in the “Theses” in the German publications, including an entirely new fragment, thesis VII. She asked him if he had other versions and if so if he knew which he’d worked from in order to produce the 1942 mimeograph. Adorno responded by saying that there were a number of copies of the “Theses” that had been sent to him from multiple places. He deferred and said that the text was under the custody of Gretel, and offered Arendt Gretel’s list of noted manuscript variants. He added that the two-volume edition of writings was “provisional” and “does not satisfy scholarly philological claims.”

Arendt hadn’t seen the other versions of the theses, and, combined with her dislike and distrust of Adorno, she questioned the veracity of his German volumes. In fact, Benjamin wrote out the “Theses” several times, making minor, and sometimes major, adjustments. Notably, looking at Arendt’s copy and the published versions of the “Theses,” the Angelus Novus fragment numbers vary. Benjamin rearranged them, edited them, and added new fragments before he sent them to Gretel. In addition to Arendt’s copy and Gretel’s copy, one draft was sent to Dora Benjamin, and copies were sent to Scholem in Palestine and Theodor Adorno in New York, which never arrived. Benjamin also translated the “Theses” into French.

On the list of corrections that Adorno sent Arendt, one clear variant stands out. Materialist is substituted for dialectic. This would constitute a significant philosophical difference. A dialectician would attend to the movement of history itself, whereas a historical materialist would attend to the materiality of history in order to reject the Marxist conception of fluid movement. The difference, in short, is the glaring difference between Adorno and Benjamin — the difference at the heart of their argument over Baudelaire. Adorno criticized Benjamin for not being dialectical enough, and Benjamin thought Adorno’s insistence on dialectics rejected materialism in favor of ideology. Benjamin was interested in looking at the images of the past, not the movement of the past as a whole. Looking through the various versions of the “Theses” this variant appears only once — in Dora Benjamin’s copy, which is presumably the version Gretel was typing from since she changed historical back to materialist.

Arendt and Adorno’s correspondence continued for six letters, and includes a discussion of Adorno’s decision not to publish Benjamin’s Baudelaire work, even after Benjamin’s death. Arendt thanked Adorno for his response, offered to send him another copy of the “Theses” she had, and remarked that it was lamentable that Adorno failed to include the original Baudelaire essay, since it was “toto coelo different.” Arendt’s implication was that it was the original, not the version Adorno made him write. Adorno responded by saying that he didn’t print the Baudelaire essay because it was a different part of the Baudelaire work, and that he was considering publishing it given the controversy around the two volumes. He added: “[T]his text did not seem to me to do justice to the tremendous claim that objectively emanates from Benjamin’s conception.” Arendt responded by calling into question Adorno’s objection: 

I knew from the letter and also from Benjamin himself that the original Baudelaire essay was very different from the later published one, and I think I have also understood your objections, although I never read the manuscript; at any rate, I do not remember...  

You write of a controversy connected with the two-volume edition of letters, of which here, naturally, I know nothing. I may have written that I'm about to write about Benjamin for the first time, naturally also using the letters. I hope very much that I do not get into a controversy, no matter on which side. I highly appreciate your introduction to the essays, but I still do not have the same image of Benjamin as you. It could happen that neither you nor Sholem [sic] will be satisfied with me.

At the end of Illuminations, Arendt offers an editor’s note, and comments on the variations in the “Theses”:  The translation of the text follows the two-volume German edition of Benjamin’s writings which, under the title Schriften, was edited and introduced by Theodor W. Adorno[.] […] Professor Adorno points out in his Introduction that it is not definitive: in the few instances where the original manuscripts could be consulted, it turned out that Benjamin’s handwriting was difficult to read, and as for the typescripts and printed newspaper or magazine copies, they “unquestionably contain numerous errors.” In the only case in which I was able to compare the original manuscript with the printed text, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” which Benjamin gave me shortly before his death, I found many important variants.

When Hannah Arendt sat down to write her introduction for Illuminations, she wrote it in German and had it translated into English by Harry Zohn, who was translating Benjamin’s work for the volume. She was concerned about Benjamin’s legacy, and because he had given her his papers to safeguard in friendship, she also felt a responsibility to make sure that they were published.

In the end, it was Arendt, not Adorno and the Frankfurt School, that introduced Benjamin to the English-speaking world. But more importantly, Benjamin’s friends were able to keep his work alive. In his final thesis, he writes:  We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.


We cannot turn back to see the future, but we can look back to Walter Benjamin’s works, in order to think about our present moment. The fragments that remain of the “Theses,” of the Arcades, the numerous biographies that try to constellate his final days, will never be complete. Somehow this disjointed historiography fits Benjamin’s own mode of critical thinking: pausing for breath, we must continuously return in a roundabout way to the object of contemplation. Benjamin’s life and work are to be returned to, without telos. And much work still needs to be done to ensure Benjamin’s legacy — works to be translated and published, stories to be told.

Credits:  This essay was originally published in 2019 in Los Angeles Review of Books.